


Boys Will Be Boys (And Sometimes So Will Girls)

by Feeling_Super_Super_Super



Category: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo | Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Genre: Canon Compliant, Crossdressing, F/F, Fake/Pretend Relationship, between eugénie and herself, but i'll tag for them when they appear, maximilien & valentine and the count & haydée both appear in later chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:47:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24124609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feeling_Super_Super_Super/pseuds/Feeling_Super_Super_Super
Summary: Eugénie Danglars has been dressing like a man for as long as she can remember, and it comes in useful when she needs to make a quick escape and start a new life.
Relationships: Eugénie Danglars/Louise d'Armilly
Kudos: 6





	Boys Will Be Boys (And Sometimes So Will Girls)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to try and start spending the weekends doing a lot of reading and writing (and schoolwork during the day) so hopefully I'll be able to get a fic up once every week or so, probably posting Sunday night or Monday morning. This will include any new wips that I think of and updating previous fics. That said, this will probably backfire when I realise in 6 months' time that I've forgotten completely about this, so apologies in advance lol if that happens

Since her disastrous betrothal and subsequent flight to Belgium, and then on towards the eager theatre-owners of Venice, Rome and Naples, Eugénie Danglars found that as great as her passion for the performing arts, her love of music and desire to act onstage, was the pleasure of indulging her whim to dress herself in the clothes of her male counterparts. She had first discovered this secret joy the first time she found herself a fugitive: disappearing from boarding school in Switzerland at the age of thirteen. Cutting her hair and donning the clothes of a classmate she had bribed with promises to tutor him in the difficult subject of Latin (which she took to with remarkable aptitude, and thus became her signature bargaining chip when dealing with the less gifted students of that school), she had snuck out of school in secret and lived an unassuming life as a young trainee among a group of shepherds for nearly a month before she was found and forced back into those stuffy classrooms and tight corsets which she had so detested. She dared not try this again at that school, but upon returning to France for the holidays, she decided to try sneaking out from the home and under the noses of her parents and their servants, spending a night wandering the streets as far as the Luxembourg Gardens and back again.

She played out this fantasy – of a boy from a modest family, blessed nonetheless with striking good looks and the wonderful childhood freedom which the unlucky children of aristocratic families can only ever look upon with envy – as many as fifteen or twenty times in the seven years more for which she lived with her parents. She enjoyed sneaking out in the middle of the night to live the adventures she dreamed about, provoking men from whom she would have passively absorbed catcalls or petty insults during the day. Occasionally when she had time during her parents’ longer absences, she would even travel to the towns a few miles out of Paris and court a girl from the provinces, though never to the point which would reveal her real sex.

The only time she ever was revealed in this way was when she had underestimated how long her newly appointed music tutor, Mlle Louise d’Armilly, the daughter of one of her mother’s family friends, intended to stay in the house, and was discovered in an extremely compromising position halfway through a bedroom window. Louise was startled, naturally, to find a man she didn’t recognise climbing through the window of her seventeen-year-old student, and, immediately fearing the worst, reached for the bell which would have sent three armed servants running into the room to fight off the intruder. It took Eugénie’s hasty, and quite thorough, undressing in front of the poor girl to finally allay her fears. Eugénie would later maintain that she was not at all embarrassed to put herself in that position – after all, it was only another girl, and she trusted Louise quite completely not to abuse that moment of intimacy. Louise, meanwhile, had decided that that was the moment she fell quite completely in love with her student, and from then on her very close friend.

The next day during their lesson Louise, having been fully informed that night by Eugénie about her guilty pleasure, proposed for her some opera pieces suited for a man’s role, with the excuse that it was important to exercise her lower register as well as the higher parts she was accustomed to. Then Eugénie, catching on to her tutor’s thoughts and agreeing with her aims, said that she found it difficult to fully engage in the characters of male parts while wearing these feminine clothes, and did Mlle Louise think it really improper to fully immerse herself in the spirit of the theatre and change into the outfit she was wearing last night?

Louise, of course, gave the answer that both the girls and the audience expected and intended; and Eugénie, continuing to display the utter lack of remorse so often necessary to protect oneself against the danger of embarrassment, nonchalantly dropped her skirt and petticoat to the floor in front of the poor Louise (who, against her better judgment, was enjoying the view) and dressed herself up once more in the scuffed waistcoat and cap in which Louise had found her last night.

This became a common occurrence in addition to Eugénie’s midnight excursions: once a week at the end of the lesson, if she had been good and learnt all her scales and vocal exercises for that week, Louise would find a song for the tenor or bass at which Eugénie could try her hand, and Eugénie would change into a jacket and trousers, always dressing and undressing in front of Louise. She never undressed further than her undergarments, keeping her feminine ones underneath her masculine clothes, as she was accustomed to since she started cross-dressing; they agreed on this rule for the first year, until Louise, one day when she felt particularly daring and Eugénie was in an especially good mood, sly suggested a duet between two lovers, with choreography which required the tenor to wear only underwear, and slowly disrobe his soprano partner. So for the first time, Louise saw Eugénie naked, and very nearly vice versa; and from then on, the barrier having been crossed, Eugénie had no qualms repeating the experience.

This shift in intimacy between the two women, who by now were both in the full blossom of young adulthood since Eugénie had turned eighteen, came more or less in tandem with an increased tendency for Louise to stay the night in Eugénie’s room, playing and singing together until the early morning and then collapsing into Eugénie’s bed together after a night of supremely unfeminine games and laughter. Eugénie confessed many times to Louise during these evenings that it was only around the older girl that she felt she could let go of the protective, deflective armour of sarcastic standoffishness that she had built up, and indeed Louise relished the fact that her student saved her sweet inner personality for her eyes only.

Slowly but unmistakably, even to the negligent eyes of Eugénie’s parents, their relationship became less that of a tutor and her student, and much more that of two very close friends; indeed, before the end of the year of Eugénie’s eighteenth birthday, the Baron Danglars initiated a formal agreement whereby Louise’s pay would be replaced with permanent lodgings in Eugénie’s quarters as, nominally, her highest-ranking servant. She was thus entitled to a small yearly stipend, and Eugénie made sure that she was able to dine in luxury, as she did to the best of her ability for all her servants. Eugénie arranged for another bed to be brought into her bedroom, which was promptly left unused.

They continued their daily lessons, but as much time was spent playing as finding ludicrous outfits for Eugénie – and on one occasion, after an entire fortnight of Eugénie’s incessant begging, Louise – to wear while she sung love songs and sonnets (for it was always love songs, Eugénie insisted on that). Young men came and went through the doors of the Danglars home, and Eugénie would sit disdainfully next to the boys with whom her parents tried to matchmake her, before retiring at last to laugh and make fun of them with Louise until they fell asleep in each other’s arms. The most recent one was Albert de Morcerf, who seemed nice enough but there was nothing especially _remarkable_ about him, as she would repeat to her friend at night, or when she sat with her at the opera, wishing she were on the stage instead of in the velvet-lined seats of her specially rented box. Louise, during these lamentations, stroked her friend’s lovely black hair, tucked it behind her ear and looked in her eyes, saying, “You’ll never be lonely, even if none of your men are ever good enough, for I’ll always stay with you instead.”

And so they continued, isolated in their companionship, maintaining the same routine for nearly three years: Eugénie tolerating those men whom she was required to tolerate, and ignoring all the rest as far as she could get away with, and finding neither friendship nor love in any but the gentle, caring Louise, who provided her with plenty of both. This arrangement, against which neither them much protested, for it suited them just fine and in any case was the best they could hope for, was punctuated only by those six months in which the Count of Monte Cristo came to Paris. Eugénie enjoyed the nights when Monte Cristo dined with the Danglars, for it invariably promised an interesting evening at least, and often enough for her liking ended in her father’s embarrassment. It pleased her greatly when her father ran into the financial troubles about which we are sure the reader already knows on account of the work of our colleague M. Dumas, for the Baron Danglars to those who did not know him was the kind of man upon whom one instinctively wishes that type of misfortune which it is entertaining to watch; and Eugénie was grateful to Monte Cristo, because it was obvious in Eugénie’s mind, even if she did not know exactly how, that he was responsible.

For these reasons, Eugénie decided that he was the only man she would ever consider a friend, and therefore she trusted with him some secrets which heretofore had only been shared with Louise. These, of course, were the details of her excursions in men’s clothes, her desire to live as an artist in Italy, and the fact that she was in love with Louise. The second item in that list, he informed her, was painfully obvious to him, and he had harboured his suspicions regarding the latter. Then, with that quickness of observation which the reader surely remembers Edmond Dantès learning from the Abbé Faria, he surmised that she planned to take Mlle d’Armilly and herself out of the country as quickly as possible to avoid her marriage to Andrea Cavalcanti (who was by this point of course her new fiancé, replacing Albert de Morcerf in such a way that Mlle Danglars scarcely noticed), and that she intended to go in disguise as a man, and therefore to use a man’s passport.

He offered a selection, of which she chose two: Monsieur Leon d’Armilly, brother of Mlle d’Armilly and an artist; and Monsieur Antoine Danglars, cousin of Eugénie herself and, by agreement of those two forces of personality in their stereotypical fashion of extravagance, endowed with the title of Baron d’Auteuil. When she expressed her worry that, without the fortune which she knew she would have to forfeit, she couldn’t justify the luxurious lifestyle required of a baron of such a large and important area of land, but Monte Cristo was quick to reassure her that she would find no difficulty on that front, guaranteeing that she would receive full ownership of her rightful inheritance in the name of her cousin by the time she reached Italy as long as she did not ask him how he would manage it. Obtaining a promise to this effect, he sent her away with the passports, letters of recommendation to a few choice theatre directors and his sincerest wishes that she would succeed, and she fled three days later when the scandal of her fiancée-to-be occurred.

The reader already knows about the girls’ escape to Belgium and the circumstances whereby they were forced to retire the identity of Leon d’Armilly, again thanks to M. Dumas, and we should not dare attempt to supplant the reader’s memory of that brilliant chapter with one of our own; instead we shall skip forward past their journey through Belgium, Germany and Switzerland, to their arrival in Milan, the first city they reached in Italy.

Eugénie and Louise decided that the Baron d’Auteuil, whom they hadn’t needed to cross any of the borders after they entered Belgium, would best serve them as a patron, so that Eugénie could take Louise’s name and hide in the safety of anonymity, without sacrificing the benefits of a recognisable name to take to prospective employers. Therefore it was Antoine Danglars, not his remarkably similar-looking cousin Eugénie, who visited the managers of La Scala and the Teatro Carcano to implore them to take on his dear cousin and her friend as an actor and a pianist, eventually convincing them with a letter from the magnificent Count of Monte Cristo; and it was Antoine who bought apartments in the fashionable part of the city using the generous income which the Count had diverted to him from his “uncle” via Luigi Vampa; and it was Antoine who introduced his friend and cousin Mlles Louise and Eugénie d’Armilly to the managers. But it was Eugénie d’Armilly who stirred up the curiosity of the Milanese opera-going public and quickly made a name for herself as the most impressive prima donna north of the River Po, and Louise who became the most highly sought-after concert pianist and music tutor in Milan.

**Author's Note:**

> Second time posting this, so if the first one mysteriously appears (it seems to have been lost into the void), my apologies and I'll delete this.


End file.
